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From Home Land to Holy Land: Iraqi Jews and the Formation of Modern Israel, 1940-1951

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From Home Land to Holy Land: Iraqi Jews and the Formation of Modern Israel, 1940-1951 FROM HOME LAND TO HOLY LAND: IRAQI JEWS AND THE FORMATION OF MODERN ISRAEL, 1940-1951 Theresa Jackson A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of History University of North Carolina Wilmington 2010 Approved by Advisory Committee ______Dr. Andrew Clark ____ Dr. William McCarthy_____ _ Dr. Lisa Pollard__________ Chair Accepted by ______________________________ Dean, Graduate School TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDEMENTS.....................................................................................................................iv DEDICATION....................................................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1: THE FORMATION OF ISRAEL: POPULATION EQUALS SECURITY, 1917-1948...............9 CHAPTER 2: IRAQ THE CHAOTIC CREATION OF A STATE, 1921-1941 ...........................................29 CHAPTER 3: IRAQI JEWS: FROM HOME LAND TO HOLY LAND, 1940-1951...................................48 CHAPTER 4: EAST MEETS WEST: THE BEINNINGS OF MIZRAHI LIFE IN ISRAEL, 1948-1951..........70 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................84 WORKS CITED...............................................................................................................................87 APPENDIX......................................................................................................................................93 ii ABSTRACT When the nation of Israel was created, the state’s architects envisioned the establishment of a Western, secular country populated with Europeans. Israel’s leaders faced tremendous difficulties in generating a population, not the least of which was the Holocaust which decimated Israel’s intended citizenry. In need of a population to contribute to security, Israel’s founders looked to the Jews of Arab countries to fulfill the state’s security needs. Declared an independent state in 1921, Iraq spent decades dominated by British imperial authority. Created out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire amid the chaotic and momentous changes of the first half of the twentieth century – World War I, World War II, colonialism, Zionism, Nazism and Communism – the British created a contentious, fragmented, and highly unstable Iraq. By the 1940s, Iraq’s political instability, combined with the war in Europe, the birth of the Israeli nation-state, and Zionist activity within the country created a situation that made life tenuous for Iraq’s Jewish community. Even with heightened tensions in the late 1940s and early 1950s, many of Iraq’s Jews had no desire to immigrate Israel, rather they were forced to leave their homeland as conditions in Iraq deteriorated. Once the Jews from Arab lands arrived in Israel, not only was preference given to those Jews emigrating from Europe, Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews found their “Arabness” rejected by the Western-oriented culture. They faced discrimination and difficulty in assimilating the Western- oriented environment that prevailed in Israel. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my thesis committee, Dr. Bill McCarthy, Dr. Andrew Clark, and Dr. Lisa Pollard. Dr. McCarthy, thank you for the time you spent working with me, and for your meticulous editing. Thank you Dr. Clark, you’ve gone beyond simply teaching and challenged me in more ways than I can properly list on this page. Special thanks to Dr. Lisa Pollard for her years of guidance, wisdom, understanding, and patience, and for the inspiration years ago that ultimately led me upon a Middle Eastern adventure of my own. I am better for having known you. Thank you to Dr. Elizabeth Hines and Dr. David La Vere for recognizing and encouraging my love of history. Thanks to Marzia Borsoi, a great portion of the experience of graduate school would have been empty without you. Thank you to my Sunday companions, Amanda, Pedro, and Herb for offering a weekly respite from school, a safe haven for ideas and complaints, and for providing endless laughter. Thanks also to my father-in-law, Doug Szymik, for all the time you spent researching my subjects of interest, and for supplying a portion of the resources used in this study. I would especially like to thank my parents – clearly nothing would be possible without you. Thank you Dad for showing me the world, and thank you Mom for teaching me how to understand all that I saw. Finally, thank you to my husband, Justin. Your patience, encouragement, and uncanny ability to always make me laugh gave me energy when I thought nothing was possible. Thank you for being my best friend - I can’t wait to see what’s next. iv DEDICATION To Michael Pass – thank you. v INTRODUCTION - You must not judge people by their country.- Paul Theroux For over three centuries of Ottoman rule, the boundaries of the modern nation-state and national lines upon which contemporary societies are forced to adhere did not exist. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I created enormous upheaval as populations throughout the Middle East confronted new definitions of national identity. At the San Remo Conference in 1920, Great Britain and France formally divided the former Ottoman territories of the Middle East into European administered mandate states. “Little more than nineteenth-century imperialism repackaged to give the appearance of self-determination,” the newly mandated Arab states were deeply resentful of the imperial administrations. 1 Through the mandate system, Great Britain and France carved up the territories of the Empire, establishing borders and states. The various religious groups, rival clans, and divergent tribes of the region were suddenly forced to adhere to a new sense of national identity which was no longer based upon patronage, clan, or religion, rather identity was manufactured by newly-formed state borders and national governments. This notion of a singular and unifying nationalism created a crisis of identity for those confined by the borders of the new states. While also pushing against the constraints of imperial rule, the populations of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Transjordan, and Iraq struggled to formulate state-based national identities. As outlined in such important historical works as A History of the Modern Middle East by William Cleveland, and The Modern Middle East by James Gelvin, assembling the state apparatus was an enormous undertaking, requiring the creation of government agencies and 1 William Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004) p.164. social programs, and the establishment of durable economic systems. Additionally, the new structure of a strict centralized government, and the pressures of adhering to the cultural uniformity of the state created immense pressure for the citizens of the new nation-states, leading severe political, economic, and social instability. Each of the new states of the Middle East wrestled with such difficulties, but Iraq was unique because of the size of its Jewish population, and the effects imperialism and nationalism wrought upon its long-established and thriving Jewish community. Economically, politically, and socially integrated into the larger Muslim community for over three thousand years, by the 1920s Jews comprised approximately 40 percent of Baghdad’s population, and controlled nearly 95 percent of the city’s businesses.2 Throughout the 1930s and 1940s as pro-British, and anti-British factions fought for power, the atmosphere in the country grew progressively more unstable resulting in no less than seven coups from 1936 to 1941.3 Iraq’s instability produced widespread social unrest, especially during the 1940s. While many Iraqi Jews shared the newfound Iraqi nationalist sentiment, confusion over the Jewish community’s alliance with Great Britain, the development of a Jewish state in Palestine through the 1940s, war with Israel in 1948, and an increase in Zionist political activity in Iraq led to the mass exodus of the community by 1951 with approximately 100,000 Jews emigrating from Iraq to Israel between 1948 and 1951. During the same period, Israel also emerged as independent nation and through the 1940s, both Israel and Iraq struggled to define their citizenry. Iraq grappled with the notion of 2 Julia Magnet, “The Terror Behind Iraq’s Jewish Exodus,” The Daily Telegraph, 16 April, 2003, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/1427687 3 Geoff Simons, Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1994) p. 184. 2 who comprised an Iraqi, and Israel struggled to create a Jewish majority in a land dominated by Muslims. When the architects of the Jewish state originally envisioned Israel it was a nation based upon secular values and comprised of Western traditions. Intending to populate the state with Jews from Europe, a significant portion of Israel’s anticipated population perished in the Holocaust. Zionist leaders were also unable to entice many American Jews to move to the dry, desert country, and Israel’s architects faced an uncertain future as the promise of building a strong Jewish state was compromised due to the
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